The voting in Chesspro’s January game of the month was unusual enough to invite tongue-in-cheek comparison to a voting scandal from the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

Originally posted here. Some strange voting for the January game of the month at Chesspro:

The final result was:

1. Vitiugov-Rodshtein, 73 points
2. Gashimov-Grischuk (the king march to b2), 65
3. Nyback-Giri, 61
4. Carlsen-Kramnik, 49
5. Anand-Kramnik, 42

Nothing too surprising about the placings… but it’s done by a system similar to Eurovision (if you don’t know what that is, be grateful!), with 10 GMs ranking their top 10 games (out of 24 nominated). Anyway, the Gashimov-Grischuk game was only listed by 5 GMs, and every single one of them gave it 13 points for 1st place! One other GM giving it 3rd place would have been enough for it to come top. The article comments:

Let’s hope this doesn’t lead to the same sort of scandal as Plushenko’s silver medal. After all the leader of the Russian team lost out to his comrade and not to some representative of bourgeois chess morals and aesthetics.

By comparison, Vitiugov Rodshtein had 5 2nd places, but also a 1st and a 6th, or Nyback-Giri was ranked by 9 GMs but only got one 1st place.